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It’s melting like crazy here and there’s a small lake in front of the Beijing Hotel (the name posted on the front of the shed. Apparently, a Chinese research biologist named Dr. Wei lived here for A YEAR. I hope I’m not there that long!).

My food box from Full Circle came tonight, so I processed my food (froze all the smoothie berries, cleaned the chard/kale/spinach, de-slimed the cilantro, whipped up some pesto with the basil that came, made some mango salsa, boiled some eggs, etc), and then came back to the hut to work on the recipe section of the summer edition of my Warrior Cleanse. I’m having a hard time nailing it down, and maybe the reason for that is subconscious… After all, I don’t know how to get an ebook on Kindle, so until I get that figured out, there’s not much of a rush. Except there is a rush bc a summer cleanse needs to be sold during the summer. 🙂 But I am hoping someone sends me a copy of Adobe InDesign CS6 bc that seems to be the most straightforward way to get it on Kindle, and sadly, I can’t afford InDesign right now.

Tomorrow a.m. I’m having a phone consult with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, the place where I eventually want to go for my health coach certification. They are going to talk me through how this will work with me being hearing impaired and not having access to a relay system. The course requires teleconferences, but I can’t hear more than one voice at a time (and even one is hard – especially when it’s on the phone). Since they insist on phone conversations, I’m hoping they will consider letting me have one-on-one calls versus the teleconferencing, which is impossible for me. They do have closed captioning available for the video lectures, so that’s awesome.

So that’s me. R has been sick all week, and I hear a lot of the village is out whaling now, so if they catch one tonight or tomorrow night (it always seems to happen at night!), she probably will be up all night and get sick all over again. I just want her to get better. Last summer she got pneumonia, and it began just like this.

I posted something on FB today about OJ costing $12 for a 1/2 gallon here in town and people were shocked. I’ll have to post some pics of other crazy prices in the store. We never buy OJ but I splurged bc of R being sick. I also bought a $6 can of Campbell’s soup. I left the store with 2 plastic bags and $75 less. If the salaries were adjusted to the town’s cost of living, it wouldn’t be so bad, but they aren’t. It’s cheaper to get my farm box once a week from Seattle. Even with shipping, it’s cheaper than shopping here, and the quality is better.

It’s late. This 24 hr daylight is killing me. I was up til 3am last night. It’s 1:15 now, and I’m going to try and sleep a bit. The sun stopped setting earlier this week and it won’t set again for a couple months.

I’m adjusting nicely. I’ve made a friend – she’s the spouse of one of my partner’s co-workers, and she has a dog that one of my dogs loves, and we have a lot of shared interests and enjoy hanging out. So that’s awesome and makes things so much nicer for me.

It’s funny – I was so terrified about living in the tiny quonset hut, but I love it. It’s ugly on the outside, but darling inside.

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The kitchen is tiny, but the white walls are bright and we’ve decorated the sparse furnishings with blankets and tosses and fabrics from all over the world, so it’s filled with memories, and there’s the constant reminder that this is a big world, and this is just one more amazing place we’re living in.

The main way I’ve managed to make peace with living in such a tiny abode is to change my attitude about the abode: I call it “The dog house.” It’s like a deluxe dream dog house for animals. They are allowed on the bed and sofa (made from a twin bed that was in here already), there are piles of blankets everywhere, it’s really comfortable, etc. And what makes it “deluxe” is that there is a kitchen and bathroom so that the humans can coincide with the dogs.

Seriously. Looking at it this way has made me love this place.

So I’m doing well. School has started up again, I’m training for my 2nd marathon, and I’m getting into the baking zone, now that we have that long table.

I’ve started two other blogs and have them linked to here: tundrarunners.wordpress.com charts my marathon training in the Arctic, and tundrakitchen.wordpress.com details my vegetarian culinary adventures in this land of the carnivore.

This will be a quickie post since my main goal is to just get the blog up and running right now as I start teaching next week and I’m going to get super busy and not have time to geek around with formatting this. I’ve set up 2 more blogs to document my challenges and adventures in running (Tundra Runner) and cooking (Tundra Kitchen) up here in Barrow, and I did it that way because I couldn’t figure out a way to do it all on this blog. The separate pages WordPress lets you create doesn’t let me do blog entries on those pages, so I’ve created the separate sites and have linked the new blogs to them using pages. This might be a stupid way to do it, and maybe I should just be using categories instead.

Who knows? Not me.

There is still no fancy CSS formatting, and there is no time (nor any money) to spend on that.

I’m all about FREE these days, since I’m living in a place where a 1/2 gallon of milk goes for $10. Yep, that’s right. Milk costs more than gas.

But so far so good. The animals are happy. We have a warm (though TINY shelter). We have an ocean view. Today we spotted grey whales passing by. How cool is that?

As I’ve been a bit of gypsy over the past few years, it maybe comes as no surprise to many that I’m moving back to Alaska this May. However, this time, it will be straight to the top – Barrow, a small coastal Inupiaq village of about 5000 people who subsist primarily on whale and seal meat.

It will be quite the adventure for this vegetarian.

The plan so far is join the Full Circle CSA and have twice-monthly deliveries of organic fresh fruit and veggies from the Seattle area. I’m not thrilled about the great amount of fossil fuels used to get me my produce, but I don’t know of any more sustainable options.

I do know that I’ll be learning to make cheese, I’ll need to become a good indoor gardener of herbs, and I’m going to being making all of our breads and pastas from gluten-free flour that I mill myself.

The learning curve will be steep, and here’s where I’ll document my trials and tribulations as well as my amazing feasts!